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Adam Fletcher
The Myth of George Bush
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Part of the challenge of George W. Bush's administration is the temptation to blame it for all the ways young people in America are screwed with today. Poor youth? Bush. Youth violence? Bush. Pregnant teens, dropouts, youth homelessness, teen job rates... Bush. However, as Henry Girioux points out in his most recent article, the devious undermining of the health of democracy, civil rights and the public good in the US has been going on over the past several administrations. And despite our desire for change, the reality is that Barack Obama will most likely make those problems worse, not better. Read Giroux's article, called " Disposable Youth in a Suspect Society: A Challenge for the Obama Administration," for the details. We have a battle to keep fighting, and just because there is great hope and promises of change doesn't make that fight any easier. Worse still, it might actually become harder.
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| November 28, 2008 | 5:11 AM |
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Lessons Learned: Know When to Fold 'Em
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I was raised with the idioms, "work smarter not harder" and, "when the going gets tough the tough get going," ringing through the air. The neighborhood where I spent my teen years was full of entreprenuers, some more legal than others, but all determined to get theirs in a difficult situation. All that is to say that the hustle comes easily to me. That's why closing CommonAction was one of the most challenging things I have ever done. Faced with the option of continuing to dig an economic grave for myself and continuing to live a dream, I had to face the reality that sometimes the smarter thing to do is not to work harder, and sometimes getting going meant getting gone.  LESSON THREE: Know When to Fold 'Em The legacy of a lifetime of serice has left my heart in a right place, full of the pulp of social justice and the vigor of righteous indignation. These are attitudes that put some people off and turn others on; they challenge the indifference pumped out in popular pedagogy by giving us a diverse narrative, one that isn't reliant on consumerism or classism to determine relationships to power and authority. However, they also create a stubborn emphasis on fighting against aggressive failure, which hounds many of us who come from "challenging" backgrounds. What happened to CommonAction was neither aggressive nor swift; rather, it was a death of a thousand blows. When the foundations who'd promised to materialize failed to in the early days of the organization I should have taken heed. When the contracts cleared and checks were sent but programs failed to sustain and adults lost interest, I should have noticed. When allies and colleagues who'd sounded determined failed to support I should have reacted. Instead I let the cards tilt and the machinations rust, allowing the house to tip and the machine to fall apart. Nonprofit leaders have to know when to call the game, either for a failed program or a dieing organization. This is a grim reality that was ironically shadowed in my life, as I was watching the DVD collection for the HBO series Six Feet Under throughout the last year of CommonAction. I don't regret folding, and I don't regret starting the organization; however, these are lessons learned. This is the third of four postings.
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| November 23, 2008 | 8:11 AM |
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Lessons Learned: Tell Your Stories
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This is the last of four posts reflecting on my experience of starting a nonprofit. In 2004, after running The Freechild Project for three years and SoundOut for two, I called together a group of friends here in Olympia to help me form a 501c3 nonprofit organization called CommonAction. CommonAction's mission was "to create uncommon solutions to common problems by engaging young people and adults together for democracy." I summoned the creative energy I had put into Freechild and SoundOut in the previous years, and called forth all the resources I could muster to build a machine. It worked. In just three years we recieved thousands of hits on our dozens of publications; mustered almost 200 workshops with more than 3,000 participants; and formed strategic partnerships with just over 150 organizations across the U.S. I call that successful. In closing the organization CommonAction's board of directors made the bold determination that our model of community organizing was destined to be inoperable. Today I agree. Lesson Four: Tell Your Stories There are little-known tales scattered throughout the streets of Activism City, stories of greed and fraud, deceit and falibility. Those tales, as well as the success stories, all have something to teach us. Some of the lessons I have learned about include the ways that politics shape nonprofits, whether stated or not; the ways The State and Corporations co-opt community organizers; the difference between activists and careerists; and ways to sustain outside the norm. I'm still working on the latter. But all told, we all have stories. These are the paths that make our journeys, and the paths that give us legitimacy, learning, and authenticity, all of which are of particular importance for those who work with young people. And if you aren't prone to running a nonprofit, more power to you! Still tell your story! We need all the energy we can tap from the people who care enough to do this work, and the power of actions comes out through good words - sometimes. Let's get your stories out here so we can learn from them, and thanks for the hard work you do.
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| November 23, 2008 | 8:11 AM |
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Lessons Learned: Small Things
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Starting a nonprofit organization appealed to my grandest visionary tendencies. To begin CommonAction I brought a sweeping notion that was inspired by what I'd started with The Freechild Project and SoundOut a few years earlier: "Let's engage all young people everywhere in as much as meaningfully as we can!" Working from that place I engaged my board of directors in a wide-range of sweeping concepts, calling forward the grandest, most far-out ideas I could think of! And while that was entertaining, it was grossly inappropriate. Nonprofits must think about the details and practicalities that affect them everyday. This is the second of four posts reflecting on my experience of starting a formal nonprofit organization.  LESSON TWO: GET THE SMALL THINGS RIGHT It’s not just money and economic policies that are important to nonprofits. I have worked in more than one organization that sought to balance the books at the expense of good programs, as they focused solely on federal funding or corporate funding and developed programs that only appealed to those funders. Consequently the young people they serve are inherently compromised as the programs they participate in - often a major educating force in their lives - reflect the political or economical considerations of the funders that support them. For government agencies these efforts are primarily prevention and intervention programs that view "high risk" youth as incomplete or broken and in need of adultist activities that primarily perpetuate classist/racist/homophobic/imperialist agendas. For corporations these efforts reflect a consumerist agenda that largely situates low-income youth as servants to upper class citizens, demeaning and deflating the value of active citizenship and cultural norms. In her classic Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, bell hooks wrote that, "Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things." In this way the visionaries behind nonprofits have to be cautious as well, as the tendency to dream big, think big and do big often comes at the expense of the details. Lets see the forest and the trees.
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| November 21, 2008 | 9:11 AM |
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Lessons Learned: Money Matters
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I find myself increasingly ready to openly reflect on my experience of starting a formal nonprofit organization and having to fold it after just three years. While CommonAction had a vibrant run, I still find myself a little bit stung; however, out of that sentiment comes some learning I want to share. This post is one of four with some of my lessons learned from starting a nonprofit. LESSON ONE: MONEY MATTERS As Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay argue in their book Fundraising Management: Analysis, Planning and Practice, the single biggest cause of nonprofits failing is that organizations let their money matters fall apart. In the case of CommonAction the money never really came together. The best policies new nonprofit organizers can adopt are those that have clear economic goals, including funding sources and revenue replacement. In 2007 a group called Incite! wrote a pivotal book about the nonprofit world called The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex. In it they make a sound a clarion call demanding that community organizers grow aware and averse to the demands of the negative funding cycles that are perpetuated by the American-oriented nonprofit-industrial complex. Anyone wanting to learn more about the truth behind the economic realities facing nonprofits should refer to that book for more. The worse parts of funding a nonprofit organization are writing grants and reporting to funders. Both of these two items caused me undue anxiety, as I am a perfectionist when it comes to grant applications, and I feel morally obligated to be accountable for how I spend others' money. In three years of constant funding-raising for CommonAction I wrote more than 50 requests for funding. I found myself constantly translating the vision and mission to funders who weren't necessarily suited for funding radical youth engagement; however, their main foci, either in education, research, policy-making or technology, aligned with our mission indirectly. That didn't seem to work: we only recieved 4 grants. As for reporting, the dilemma became finding time to compile the evaluations, aggregate the data, and identify measurements that effectively quantified the investments made in the organization. Where I wasn't particularly successful in securing grant funding I made up for in fee-for-service contracts, and those contracts regularly required reports that called for this type of analysis. I rose to the task, but not easily; I challenge anyone considering starting a nonprofit to think about this component particularly. This is my first post on this topic; I'll put out three more. However, I might consider this the most important point. The reality that I face in this work, unfortunate or otherwise, is that I have little room for economic disparity in my own life. That leads me to work hard and diligently for my money, and demands that I take my labors seriously enough to give money the attention it deserves. Nonprofits require cash, and money matters
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| November 20, 2008 | 9:11 AM |
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Sequence for Disengaging Youth Voice
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The sequence of disengaging Youth Voice: - Youth aren't prepared to engage with adults.
- Adults aren't prepared to engage with young people.
- Youth are limited to working only on issues affecting youth.
- Adding Youth Voice is an afterthought to planning, occurring only the day of the meeting, rather than as a course of action with framing and reflecting activities.
- The meeting was not announced in enough time to allow young people participants to prepare.
- Meeting times conflict with previously planned activities, limiting the participation of more young people.
- Youth are not told about expectations for their involvement.
- Young people did not receive training on committee participation or the issues addressed by the organization.
- There is inequitable representation between young people and adults.
- Youth have no structured reflection to focus on their experience of being involved in the committee.
- Adults are armed with good intentions instead of experience-driven practice.
- Adults don't have knowledge of or access to materials to help them develop their committee.
- The nature of the activity has limited appeal to historically non-involved youth.
- Participation is seen as separate and unrelated from classes or youth programs, despite the opportunities for applied learning in communication, leadership, and social awareness.
- Youth Voice opportunities are seen as separate and unrelated from youth service activities, despite the connections between serving on the committee and community service.
- Adults make no overt concessions designed to engage young people in activities.
- Adults rely on young people to answer questions like, "What do you think?" in the same way another adult would.
- Lacking opportunities to reflect on their participation, youth complain to other youth about the experience, further disinteresting other youth from becoming involved.
- Adults' perceptions of young people and their involvement further alienate diverse Youth Voice.
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| November 19, 2008 | 11:11 AM |
| November 19, 2008 | 1:11 AM |
| November 18, 2008 | 3:11 AM |
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Not Drastic, But Significant
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I stumbled onto this analogy wrote in 2002. Its simple, and I think still illustrates its point well. Once there was a revolution. It wasn't a drastic one, but it was a significant one.
It started one day when a young woman was walking down the street, pulling a small cart behind her to the market. She came upon a man sitting on a curb, holding his head in his hands. Instead of hustling past him, she stopped and talked with him.
While she was talking to him a little boy rode by on his bicycle. The little boy rode past the two and their conversation again and again. Then he stopped and stood still on his bike, openly eavesdropping. For a moment he was mesmerized, frozen in place.
Suddenly his eyes followed from the girl and the man toward a car's tire rolling by beside them. s if in slow motion the boy saw a squirrel dart underneath the tire, and as it was run over the boy winced painfully. He quickly set his bicycle down by the side of the road, and without looking up or down the street he hustled to the squirrel's lifeless body.
The boy scooped up the carcass with big-mittened hands. The mittens, far too big for the boy, looked like a pillow under the squirrel. The young woman and the man walked over to the boy, and without prompting the boy set the dead squirrel into her basket. When another car came rushing upon the three, the man began waving the driver aside.
The three walked slowly without talking, heading to a park across the street. Again, without prompting, the man pulled a small spade from a his knapsack he had with him. Holding trembling hands out the girl took the spade and dug a small hole. After a few moments the boy set the squirrel inside.
When they were finished, the boy whispered an alms, the young woman a prayer, and the man a secret poem. As they were walking away the boy handed his too-big mittens to the man. Then he got on his bike, cranked the wheels, and rolled away. The girl dusted out her cart, set it on the sidewalk, and pulled it down the road. The man got into his car and slowly pulled away.
It wasn't a drastic revolution that day, but a significant one.
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| November 16, 2008 | 12:11 PM |
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Confronting George Counts
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We must abandon completely the naive faith that education automatically liberates the mind and serves the cause of human progress; in fact we know it may serve any cause. It may serve tyranny as well as freedom, ignorance as well as enlightenment, falsehood as well as truth. It may lead men and women to think they are free even as it rivets them in chains of bondage... In the course of history, education has served every purpose and doctrine contrived by man; if it is to serve the cause of human freedom, it must be explicitly designed for that purpose." - G. Counts in Education and the Foundations of Human Freedom. (1963)  George Counts was a man ahead of our times. A professor at Columbia University for more than 30 years, he wrote deftly about how schools manipulated student thinking and formed the basis of political and social norms throughout our society. He studied Soviet education systems for decades, disavowing their system of brainwashing and anti-freedom teaching; however, he wasn't a booster of the American system either, often lambasting American teachers for ignoring or denying their social and political possibilities, which, according to Counts' analysis, resulted in blinded consumerism and crass consumption.
I maintain that we have to continue building on Counts' analysis today, as the essential underpinnings of his arguments continue to hold true throughout our educational attempts with young people. By examining the possibilities of what youth workers and teachers are currently doing and could potentially do we could move educational systems towards a more productive and meaningful space for all members of society, even if that involves "building a new social order" - which is what the call for "re-examining the roles of youth in society" is all about.
Thanks to Counts and several others we have a theoretical base to found this work in. Now, where does the rubber meet the road? Or wait - is that what this is all about?
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| November 15, 2008 | 11:11 AM |
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